Land in the Age of Emancipation – Imagining Black Freedom During Reconstruction

• In Event: Race, Ethnicity, and American Political Development

Abstract

2020 was a historic year for racial justice in the United States. In the midst of multiple escalating public health and political crises, racial and economic justice movements, often led by Black and Indigenous activists, have responded by building mutual aid networks, demanding greater community control, and forging new coalitions committed to reimagining political, social, and economic institutions. In particular, one demand has received renewed importance and organizing energy: Black and Indigenous land rights. And while the particular configuration of crises may be unprecedented, demands for land rights have a long, if often forgotten, history in Black and Indigenous organizing and political thought.

In this paper, I attempt to recover one such history, namely the struggle for land rights by African Americans following Emancipation. I develop a theoretical and historical framework for understanding post-Emancipation land and place the Black ‘right to the land’ at the center of the early Black freedom struggle. Drawing on freedpeople’s accounts from the Freedmen’s Bureau and National Colored Convention archives, this paper argues that freedpeople's demands for a ‘right to the land' was a central component of an anti-racist, cooperative, and communal Black republicanism. Additionally, this paper contextualizes African American’s post-Emancipation land claims by placing them in conversation with contemporaneous discourses around Indigenous land rights and labor republican visions of a cooperative commonwealth. Read together, these radical late-19th century visions of land sought to redefine the boundaries of citizenship by fundamentally challenging racialized notions of private property and economic independence.

Author

• Rutger Ceballos, University of Washington, Seattle